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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26019163">Life Here on Earth</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin'>azephirin</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Age Difference, Ambiguous Relationships, Andy/Baklava OTP, Andy/Booker brotp, Baklava, Bathing/Washing, Booker | Sebastien le Livre Gets a Small Percentage of His Shit Together, Booker | Sebastien le Livre Needs Therapy, F/M, Femdom, Grape-Nuts Are Disgusting, Guilt, Illness, Paris (City), Pegging, Post-Canon, Reading Aloud, Reunions, Sex Shop, Sharing a Bed, Tired Andy | Andromache of Scythia, mildly AU</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 06:00:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,025</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26019163</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t recognize the number, but no one else would, after two years of silence, lead with, <i>I’ll be there Thursday. You know what to buy.</i></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Booker | Sebastien le Livre</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>210</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Life Here on Earth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title from "<a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/indigogirls/historyofus.html">History of Us</a>" by the Indigo Girls, because how could I resist a song whose first line is, "I went all the way to Paris to forget your face"?</p><p>Mildly AU in that the precredits scene hasn't happened (yet?).</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>      Booker has already burned through multiple phones since they left him by the Thames, but it’s somehow not a surprise when Andy’s text shows up. He doesn’t recognize the number, but no one else would, after two years of silence, lead with, <em>I’ll be there Thursday. You know what to buy.</em></p><p>      Part of him feels anger catch like a flame: <em>You abandoned me, you bitch, you let the rest of them abandon me, and now you fucking text me like we just saw each other a week ago telling me to shop for you? </em>But most of him is desperately grateful to see even those sparse words, to know that she’s alive and, one can only assume, well and that he’ll see her in just a few short days.</p><p>      The shopping is a challenge. These couple of years are the first time in more than a century that he’s been in France for any length of time greater than sporadic safehouse stays. There’s probably an American grocery store where he can get Andy’s favorite cereal—Grape-Nuts, of all the goddamn things—but he has no idea where to find baklava that will meet her standards. And then there are the other items.</p><p>      To his surprise, he finds Andy’s disgusting cereal fairly quickly: there is in fact an American grocery store in the 11<sup>th</sup> Arrondissement that carries it. The baklava involves a lot of sampling, and Booker is heartily sick of it by the time he settles on the offerings of a Tunisian patisserie near the Cluny.</p><p>      That leaves the final items.</p><p>      They’re not difficult to locate, and Booker probably could have just ordered them online like a civilized denizen of the twenty-first century if he hadn’t been so focused on baklava and fucking Grape-Nuts. But he didn’t get to it in time, and Andy’s arriving tomorrow, assuming her text was genuine and not just Joe or Nicky fucking with him out of spite. Booker doesn’t actually think either of them would do something like that, but the back of his mind presents it as a more likely possibility than the idea that he will see Andy in twenty-four hours. They said a hundred years; Booker knows they meant it.</p><p>      After some internet searching and most of a bottle of wine, though, Booker knows where he needs to go and has the nerve, or at least the liquid courage, to do it. The store is called Dollhouse, and it’s in the Marais, on the ground floor of a lovely old building with classically Parisian casement windows and balconies with elaborate balustrades. Not seedy or dirty at all, even though one of the shopwindow mannequins has what appears to be a leash around her neck. Both mannequins are wearing elegant lacy underwear, of which the store seems to carry a wide selection.</p><p>      Booker goes in, because if he lingers on the street any longer, he’s going to look like a creep.</p><p>      Inside, the shop is tastefully lit and decorated with fresh flowers. Everything is sleek and clean, and Booker feels like an oaf in his battered jeans and old chambray shirt, with his unkempt hair and beard. The woman behind the counter—which is really just a desk with an Apple laptop sitting on it—is young, pretty, and cheerful, which somehow makes things worse. But when she asks Booker whether he’s looking for anything in particular, he answers truthfully, and she leads him downstairs to a section that's discreet but by no means concealed. He doesn’t need any further guidance: he and Andy have done this enough that he knows what they both like.</p><p>      Andy said Thursday. It’s Wednesday. Nevertheless, it’s not really a shock when Booker returns to his apartment carrying a chic white shopping bag and finds her on his couch.</p><p>      “Welcome back, asshole,” she says. There’s an empty cereal bowl next to her, but, surprisingly, the box of baklava remains unmolested on the kitchen table.</p><p>      He puts down the bag and locks the door. “Two years, and that’s what you have to say?”</p><p>      She’s as sharp and as beautiful as ever, like the gleam of a blade. Her hair is shorter than it was two years ago, shorter than Booker’s own—and, startlingly, it’s salted with gray. It never occurred to Booker that he would see Andy with gray hair. Her clothes, as always, are nondescript: dark jeans, dark shirt, dark jacket. She’s wearing the necklace that Booker has never seen her without. Her cheekbones, though, are more pronounced, suggesting that she’s lost weight, which she didn’t have much of to spare.</p><p>      Instead of answering, she gets up, puts her bowl in the sink, and opens the patisserie box. She holds out a piece of the baklava to Booker, and even though he’s had enough of the stuff to last him another couple of centuries, he takes it. Andy bites into her piece, and she makes the sound she always does, a combination of surprise and pleasure. She doesn’t enumerate the flavors, but when she’s done, she drops her head against Booker’s shoulder and makes a noise of satisfaction.</p><p>      The resentful part of him is still simmering, but that sickly heat feels less intense and further away than it often does, almost completely quenched by how glad he is to see her. He puts his arm around her, and they stand like that for a while, leaning against the hutch in the gentle afternoon light. She feels smaller, Booker thinks—maybe the lost weight, or maybe he just forgot her shape these past two years, forgot the sensation of her next to him. But Booker doesn’t think he’ll ever forget that, no matter how many years go by. She smells familiar, like the almond soap she likes to keep on hand when she’s staying in one place for a while. So she’s settled, or at least as settled as she ever is, but she’s thinner, which Booker is sure is not for lack of attempts on Joe and Nicky’s part to feed her.</p><p>      “What are you doing here, Andy?” Booker finally asks.</p><p>      “I can’t visit an old friend?”</p><p>      <em>Is that what we are?</em> Booker thinks, but he doesn’t say it out loud. “Why now?” he asks. “It hasn’t been anywhere close to a hundred years. Do the others know you’re here?”</p><p>      “I don’t think I’ve been to Paris since we were here in 1968,” Andy says. “Why don’t you show me around?”</p><p>      Booker takes a deep breath and lets it out, because Andy will tell him what she wants, when she wants—this too seems unchanged. “Sure,” he says, knowing that argument will get him nowhere. “What do you want to see?”</p><p>      They end up going to a bunch of galleries in the Marais, because Andy likes modern art that looks like somebody took a blowtorch to a car wreck. Booker has a moment of irrational nerves that someone will recognize him from his trip to the sex shop earlier. He talks himself down from it: the Marais is a crowded area in a large city, and anyway that shop exists because many people besides himself want to buy things from it. If they don’t need to be embarrassed, he doesn’t need to be embarrassed.</p><p>      Nevertheless, he blushes when they pass it. Andy, of course, notices, and she looks at the shopwindow and then back at Booker. “That couldn’t have been cheap,” she says.</p><p>      “It wasn’t,” Booker replies.</p><p>      She doesn’t respond in words, but she takes his arm as they walk.</p><p>      After Andy has seen her fill of million-euro car accidents, a frankly disturbing armchair covered in upholstered dicks, and a taxidermied deer—but also an unexpectedly beautiful collection of brushstroke pieces that look like dark ribbons on paper—they head back. There’s a Basque restaurant in his neighborhood that Booker thinks she might like. It’s an easy thirty minutes from here on the Métro, but Andy says she’d rather walk. It’ll take a solid hour, but they can cut through the Jardin des Plantes, which is always pleasant.</p><p>      It’s an easy walk over flat terrain, but Andy’s pace is slower than Booker has ever seen, and it’s not because she’s slowing down to sightsee. They’re barely over the bridge when she says tightly, “I need to sit down,” which is the first time in two hundred years that Booker has heard those words come out of her mouth. Her expression is a combination of anger and frustration, and Booker doesn’t comment, just guides her to one of the benches along the Quai de la Tournelle. “Fuck this motherfucking shit,” Andy adds once she’s sitting. She takes several deep breaths and coughs in a way that Booker associates with tuberculosis outbreaks.</p><p>      That’s enough to finally drive him to ask, “Andy, what the hell is going on?”</p><p>      “Nothing,” she says.</p><p>      “Bullshit.”</p><p>      She glares at him, but only briefly before her mouth curls into a wry smile. “Fine. You’re right. It’s not nothing, but I’m not dying.”</p><p>      <em>Not dying</em> covers a host of circumstances, many awful, but it’s better than the alternative. Booker wants to put his arm around her again, but Andy barely welcomes comfort even when she isn’t feeling vulnerable and defensive. Booker says only, “We can take an Uber from here. Or there’s a good Syrian place right around the corner.”</p><p>      Andy opts for the Syrian place, whether out of desire for Syrian food or unwillingness to further demonstrate that she might not be superhuman Booker doesn’t know but can make an educated guess. She sounds and looks better after they eat—Booker hadn’t realized how pale she was—and she insists that she’s fine to walk the rest of the way, but Booker gets them an Uber nevertheless. She obviously wasn’t fine to walk as far as they did, and it’s still another half hour home. She glowers at him again but doesn’t actually protest.</p><p>      Back at his apartment, they each have another piece of the baklava, and things are strangely peaceful. Booker picked up <em>Nos Richesses</em> a few weeks ago and has been meaning to start it, so he reads it to Andy. She’s never read for pleasure, at least not since he’s known her, and he remembers freezing in place when he realized, some decades after he met her, that she’s older than the written word. He’s never asked when she learned to read, what language she first wrote, but he does know that both skills are functional rather than enjoyable for her. But Andy likes stories—likes telling them, likes hearing them—and Booker imagines her sitting around a fire in some unimaginably distant time, sharing the stories that became the books he knows.</p><p>      Lying on his small couch, she listens contentedly as he reads. She seems to doze off a couple of times, but she opens her eyes when Booker pauses, so he keeps going. It’s several chapters before she’s genuinely asleep, with no reaction when he stops reading. He marks their place in the book and goes over to her. “Andy,” he says softly. “Andromache.”</p><p>      She rouses enough to get her outer layer of clothes off and stumble into bed. There’s only one—his—but they’ve shared many times before. Booker strips down to his boxers and falls asleep to the sound of her breathing.</p><p>+||+||+</p><p>      For probably the first time ever, he wakes up before Andy does. It’s not light yet, and she’s curled up on the other side of the bed, no pillow but with her head resting on her outstretched arm. She’s managed to steal the entire duvet. Booker pulls back what he can, and she doesn’t awaken, just rolls with it until she’s next to him with her face pressed into his shoulder. He works an arm around her even though it means that she will probably murder him when she wakes up. It’s a tradeoff Booker’s willing to make. He falls back asleep.</p><p>+||+||+</p><p>      When he wakes up for the second time, the sun is up, he isn’t dead, and she’s sitting on the bed with Booker’s recent nonfood purchases unboxed and strewn around her. She’s examining the dildo, which is realistic per both of their preferences but smaller than they’ve used in the past: it’s been two years, and Booker’s pretty sure he needs to work back up to some of their previous sizes. The harness is unfussy, basically a pair of high-end black underwear with a strategically placed O-ring; they’ve tried a few different kinds over the years, and fiddling with straps gets annoying. He got lube too, because the crap that he has for himself isn’t going to hold up for this.</p><p>      Andy’s grinning at him. “You didn’t think I forgot, did you?”</p><p>      “I was hoping you didn’t.”</p><p>      “Anyone fucked you since me?”</p><p>      “No,” Booker says. “You were the last.” He’s had sex a few times since leaving the team, people he met in bars or online when he got desperate enough for the touch of another person, but no one’s fucked him. It’s not something he normally likes, but Andy is, as always, the exception to everything.</p><p>      He hasn’t slept beside another person since then, either.</p><p>      Andy leaves the various items where they are and moves to sit against the headboard. “Book,” she says, “come here.” He obeys, of course, and sits between her outstretched legs. She runs her hands over his body, and he realizes for the first time since waking how close to naked he is. She’s wearing a tank top and underwear, and he can feel the warmth of her body through the thin cloth. He slouches so that he can rest his head on her shoulder; he’s getting aroused even though her touch is straightforward, exploratory, almost nonsexual. But it’s impossible not to respond to her hands on his skin. He breathes out and gives himself to her.</p><p>      When she draws two fingers over his lips, Booker opens his mouth and sucks on them like they’re her cock. He hears her inhale, and smiles in satisfaction. He’s on the way to hard now, and he shifts restlessly. She puts a firm hand on his hip, though, and he stays in place.</p><p>      She takes the fingers from his mouth and circles them around one nipple, and he inhales sharply. When she actually trails them over it, he moans, and she responds by playing the nipple between them. He knows that she likes the sounds he makes, likes drawing them from him, and he lets her hear them as she touches him.</p><p>      “Turn over,” Andy says after some amount of time, and Booker does. She kicks off the underwear, and he pulls her down until she’s at a better angle for him to get his mouth on her. He teases her for a while, kissing and licking her inner thighs, her mons, basically everywhere but her clit, until she swears at him and he gives her his tongue where she wants it. He works her gently, letting it build while he buries himself in the taste of her and listens to the gasps and little cries she can’t help making. Her fingers tighten in his hair, and he keeps up what he’s doing, does it faster and harder, and she comes against him and around him, flooding him with her wetness. He rubs his face in it and she shudders, then pulls him up.</p><p>      Andy keeps her grip on his hair when she kisses him, and by the end of it they’re both covered in her. Booker kisses her jaw, her throat, the lobe of her ear, and thinks that he could spend all day licking Andy’s juices off her, then going down on her again to make some more.</p><p>      But, as always, she has other plans. She hands him the lube he bought and says, “Open yourself up.”</p><p>      It’s both embarrassing and thrilling when she watches him do this. Sometimes she does it for him, fingering his hole and rubbing his prostate until he’s begging to be fucked, but often she tells him to do it and watches with avid eyes as he does.</p><p>      He starts slow, breathing deeply and rubbing his perineum. Andy bends down and kisses him, strokes the head of his cock, and Booker pushes up into her hand. He works a finger inside, spreading his legs wider; his eyes want to close at the feeling of penetration, but he keeps them open so that he can look at her. He bites his lip as he fucks himself: it feels good, but he wants more.</p><p>      He holds out his hand, and she gives him more lube. The second finger is a stretch but a good one, and he moans out loud. She raises an eyebrow. “You're not as tight as I’d have guessed.”</p><p>      Booker has to take a breath before he can respond. “I said no one else fucked me. I didn’t say I didn’t do it to myself.”</p><p>      “Did you think about me?” Andy asks. Her hand doesn’t stop moving on his cock.</p><p>      Booker could lie, but there’s no real reason to. “Yeah,” he says, choking back another moan. “I did. I do.”</p><p>      She kisses him again, hard, and says, “Add another finger.”</p><p>      It’s a little more than he was prepared for, but he feels himself opening, as though she commands even his subconscious body. He rubs upward, against his prostate, and gasps despite himself: the pleasure is sudden and unexpected every time. Andy uses her teeth on one of his nipples, and Booker’s whole body jerks.</p><p>      She stands up and pulls on the harness, then situates the dildo inside it. When they’ve used more complicated harnesses, he’s often put them on her, but watching is also good: the sight of her, unselfconscious and intent, makes his mouth go dry. He swallows and manages, “You better have cleaned that.”</p><p>      Andy laughs. “I boiled it while you were asleep. And what does it matter to you?”</p><p>      “Just because I’d survive a bacterial infection in my ass doesn’t mean I want one.”</p><p>      “You have the worst pillow talk in the world, Book.”</p><p>      She kneels between his legs, and he can’t help reaching up to touch her, running his hands over her hips, her belly, her breasts; she strips off the tank top and he cups her neck, thumbs her nipples, caresses her arms and shoulders.</p><p>      He’s ready for her, but she takes the lube, pushes him gently but firmly back down on the bed, and fingers him some more. Finally he can’t take it—he’s ready, he’s been ready—and he says, “Andy. Fuck me.”</p><p>      She does.</p><p>      He cries out at her first push inside: as good as fingers can feel, there’s nothing like being taken this way. Andy leans forward so that they’re face to face. Looking into her eyes is almost more intense than he can take, but he can’t look away. Her thrusts are sharp and quick, and Booker reaches over his head to grasp one of the bedposts for leverage. Andy grabs his throat, not so tightly as to do damage but enough to remind him that she can, and Booker doesn’t resist.</p><p>      Her next thrust is almost brutally hard, and he throws his head back, exposing his neck to her, letting her do what she will. She eases up after that, but she’s still going deep, and he realizes that the breathy whimpers he hears are coming from himself. It’s so good that he can’t stay still, can’t keep his eyes open, but she closes a fist in his hair and says, “Booker. Look at me,” and he can’t do anything else. With his free hand, he touches her everywhere he can: her back, her thighs, her shoulders, all strong and angular. He loses track of time, lost in the sensations of her slow, deep pace. He’s still making those soft, vulnerable noises every time she drives into him, but he can’t make himself care what he sounds like; he says her name, probably a few times.</p><p>      Andy pulls his hand down from the bedpost and guides it to his cock, and Booker strokes himself luxuriantly in rhythm with her. But then she speeds up, and his body ignites. She drives into him hard, bracing her hands on the mattress, and he jerks himself off faster, his fingers tight around his cock. He’s crying out with each thrust, begging her for something he’s too far gone to name. She pushes his legs so wide it almost hurts, and it’s there, spread for her, desperate and undone, that Booker comes. It pumps out of him in spurts that don’t feel like they’re going to end, the kind of pleasure that’s so overwhelming it’s almost painful, and his body writhes like it can’t decide whether this is ecstasy or torture.</p><p>      When the aftershocks have shuddered through him and died out, he reaches for her with shaky hands and pulls her close. They lie tangled up in each other until Booker’s breath steadies; then Andy sits back on her knees and pulls out. She’s careful—she doesn’t like to cause pain without meaning to—but it was a hard fuck after a long time, and he still winces a little. But he isn’t sorry.</p><p>      They’re covered in sweat and semen, and they both reek of sex. They are, in a word, disgusting.</p><p>      Booker kisses Andy briefly, then gets up to do some rudimentary cleaning, but that’s nowhere near sufficient. He washes his hands, brushes his teeth, and then starts running a bath in the old clawfoot tub that may look charming but is actually incredibly annoying, though he will certainly take it over having no running water at all. He goes back into the bedroom and says, “Bath?”</p><p>      Andy makes a show of rolling her eyes about it, but she doesn’t actually argue: she’s in just as disreputable a state as Booker is. She stands up, stretches, and that’s when Booker sees a small round mark on her lower left side: a scar that can only be the marker of where he shot her.</p><p>      She sees him staring and sighs. “Yeah,” she says, “that’s it.”</p><p>      A lot of words get jumbled in his mouth, and the ones that come out are, “I’d have thought it would be bigger.”</p><p>      “Said the actress to the bishop.”</p><p>      Booker has literally no idea how to respond to that.</p><p>      “The water’s going to run over,” Andy adds after a moment of silence. She walks past him into the bathroom and finds an unopened toothbrush in the medicine cabinet. Booker gets into the tub and, after a couple of minutes, she joins him.</p><p>      The tub is a reasonable size, but not so big that two tall people can comfortably sit facing each other without a lot of awkward leg maneuvering. Finally Booker cocks an eyebrow and holds out his arms; Andy makes another face but comes into them. They’ve showered together many times—as often as not because it’s less awful to wash brain matter and pieces of skull out of your hair if you have someone with you—but real baths are rare.</p><p>      Booker doesn’t own bubble bath or anything, but he did pour in some of the fancy shampoo that Joe got him hooked on and that is now an expensive guilty pleasure, so the water smells kind of like herbal tea. The scent isn’t bad, and it’s affirmatively nice to lie back with Andy in his arms and close his eyes. He’s not tired—he actually slept well, for once—but he thinks he could doze off like this.</p><p>      But his fingers can’t help finding that horrible sunburst, small but unmistakable on her skin, and he whispers, “I’m sorry, Andy.”</p><p>      “I know,” she says.</p><p>      “If I could take it back—”</p><p>      “You can’t.”</p><p>      “I know.” He wants to ask whether she forgives him, but it’s a pathetic question—and he isn’t sure he wants to know the answer. He supposes that her visit is answer enough. Which reminds him of a question whose answer he does want. “Why now?” he asks again. There’s no anniversary he can think of, no event that would have sent her here. “It’s not the right date, and anyway it’s been two years, not a hundred. You know I’m happy to see you, but why?”</p><p>      She stares out the small, high window and doesn’t answer immediately. Finally she says, “I had this idea after I lost my immortality that I would die heroically in battle—on a mission. Go out in a blaze of glory.” She stops, but Booker doesn’t prod her, just waits for her to continue. “A few weeks ago we finished this long and stupidly complicated job in Finland. We were all incredibly happy to be done and getting the fuck out of Finland, and we spent our last night there getting drunker than I have been in a very long time. Around two or three a.m., we had a bottle of champagne open, and Joe told this ridiculous joke, and I started laughing in the middle of drinking. It went down the wrong way, and I thought I was going to cough up my goddamn lungs, and then we moved back to vodka like civilized people. I felt like shit the next day, but I figured I was just hung over, since I get those now. I was also still coughing, but we’d just left Finland in the winter, so. I started running a fever, but again, I figured I’d come down with a cold, which are also things I get now.”</p><p>      Booker adds it all up. “Pneumonia?”</p><p>      Andy sighs. “Yeah. We got to Shenyang—we were going to get some families out of North Korea—and I ended up in the hospital a week later.”</p><p>      “Jesus, Andy,” Booker says. “That’s bad.”</p><p>      “It was,” she admits, alarmingly. There’s another pause. “They all wanted to call you. Even Nicky.” Her phrasing isn’t a surprise: Nicky’s anger is, like his kindness and his patience, steady and unwavering. Where Joe’s anger flares and then burns out just as quickly, Nicky’s is glacial: slow and massive. Andy goes on, “But I knew you’d flip out and show up in China.” She’s not wrong. “But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, I was lying in a bed on the twenty-third floor of a hospital in a city that I don’t actually think I’d ever been to before, in this weird wing that was only for non-Chinese people, on IV antibiotics and hooked up to fucking oxygen, and I realized: I could die from anything. Not on a mission, not saving someone’s life, but from getting hit by a bus, or aspirating champagne because my friend told a dumb joke while we were drinking.” Booker tightens his arms around her, and she doesn’t protest. “And I wanted to see you again. In case something happens, in case I die before I expect to in some absurd way that normal people die, I wanted to make sure I saw you.”</p><p>      There’s another silence, but it’s not tense. Andy’s short hair feels like soft bristles against Booker’s shoulder, and he runs a hand through it, enjoying the silky, spiky feel. “I’m glad you did,” he says finally.</p><p>      “Yeah,” she responds. “Wash my hair.”</p><p>      He does.</p><p>+||+||+</p><p>      Two mornings later, he wakes up to find Andy fully dressed and sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed. Her packed bag is on the floor in front of her, and, to Booker’s surprise, she’s reading <em>Nos Richesses</em>. “This is good,” she says.</p><p>      “You can take it,” Booker tells her. “I can pick up another copy.”</p><p>      “You sure?”</p><p>      “Yeah. You know I always like an excuse to visit a bookstore.” She dogears the page to mark her place—Booker forces himself not to comment, since it belongs to her now—and puts the paperback in her bag. “How are you getting back?” he asks, carefully, since she hasn’t volunteered where the team is staying.</p><p>      “Train,” she says, which probably means Europe, but it wouldn’t surprise him to learn that she’s got tickets for the Paris-Moscow Express and from there to points farther: Bukhara, Xian, even Shanghai or Hanoi. She looks at her phone. “Copley says to remind you that your deed to this building is from 1892 under the name Sébastien le Livre and that he’s happy to help you fix that.”</p><p>      “Tell Copley to go fuck himself,” Booker says reflexively. He can take care of the damn deed on his own. Which, to be honest, he needs to do.</p><p>      “While I’m thinking of it, your locks apparently date from about the same era, so maybe you should see to them while you’re at it.”</p><p>      “You can go fuck yourself too,” Booker tells her, without rancor. She’s right, though: he should update the locks, and clean up the hallways and the other apartments as well. He hasn’t had tenants for decades and doesn’t need them—like the rest of the team, he has a decent amount of money squirrelled away in various places—but there are certainly people in Paris who could use an affordable place to live in a decent neighborhood. “When do you need to get your train?”</p><p>      “I should go pretty soon.”</p><p>      “Take your revolting cereal with you.”</p><p>      She laughs. “I ate the last of it. I left you a piece of baklava, though.” She adds, “You should keep the other things you bought. I expect we’ll use them again.”</p><p>      “We will?” His tone is more surprised—and pleased—than he wanted it to be.</p><p>      Andy stands up and kisses his forehead. “Have a little faith, Book. You want to get dressed and walk me to the Métro?”</p><p>      “Sure,” he says.</p><p>      While he’s sorting through the clothes on the floor to figure out what isn’t dirty—maybe he’ll actually do laundry tonight, which would be a minor miracle—Andy’s phone buzzes again. “Nile wants to know if she can text you,” Andy says.</p><p>      “Yeah, of course,” Booker answers, pulling a reasonably clean shirt from the pile. “Give her my number.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you liked this story, please <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2F&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;text=Life%20Here%20on%20Earth%20by%20azephirin%20-%20The%20Old%20Guard%20(Movie%202020)&amp;tw_p=tweetbutton&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F26019163&amp;via=ao3org">retweet</a> or <a href="https://azephirin.tumblr.com/post/627020773375279104/fic-life-here-on-earth-the-old-guard">reblog</a>!</p><hr/><p>Thanks to the best fandom cabal ever—Lurker M, merisunshine36, ninhursag, rubynye, and thedeadparrot—for the encouragement and medical/surgical consultations. Extra thanks to thedeadparrot for reading this through and letting me spam her with snippets; no thanks to her, however, for giving me Booker feelings.</p><p>The <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/163826">dick-covered armchair</a> is real (though it’s in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, not a gallery in Paris), as is the <a href="https://leaflet.perrotin.com/view/9/nature-loves-to-hide">installation with the taxidermied deer</a>, wtf, but happily so are the <a href="https://leaflet.perrotin.com/view/29/the-sublime-charcoal-light">beautiful brushstroke works</a>.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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